Leon Mir
1938–2013
Submitted by Judith Mir/mss
Dr. Leon Mir was born in Krystynopol, Poland on July 13, 1938. He died on Saturday, February 23, 2013 in Brookline, MA of liver cancer.
He emigrated to Canada in 1948 and later to New York. He obtained his B.A. and B.S. from the Columbia School of Engineering in 1959 and his M.S. and Sc.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 1961. He was a fiftyyear member of the American Chemical Society.
Mir’s expertise was in the fields of membrane and chromatographic separation technologies. He worked at Abcor, Millipore, Ionics and Protient and for a long time was a consultant in separation processes.
In 2005 Mir co-invented singlepass tangential-flow filtration, an important innovation in ultra-filtration processes, for which he obtained several patents. In 2006 he co-founded SPF Innovations to develop and commercialize the technology.
He was the husband of Judith Bedrick Mir, father of Jonathan Philip Mir of New York and Lisa Tova Mir of San Diego, CA. He had two grandsons, Nicholas David Mir and Alexander Grounds Mir.